The IGN family of gaming websites is my general “go to” source for game reviews and game-related news, information and editorials. I’ve been an avid fan since the early 2000′s and visit their various websites on an almost daily basis.
Lately, IGN has been giving me a different reason to love them, though. Earlier this week, Rus McLaughlin told us readers why he doesn’t think Halo 3: ODST is Game of the Year material, citing issues he apparently doesn’t believe apply to the equally unimpressive but far less hyped Halo 3, which prompted me to point out how Halo 3 fails in the same ways. I’m thankful for this as there are only so many reviews one can write in a week. 
A couple of days ago, Ryan Geddes opined that Epic Games needs to rip certain pages from Bungie’s Halo playbook in order for their blockbuster Gears of War franchise to thrive in the future. In addition to the rather unbelievable supposition that there’s any chance that future Gears of War games won’t be even more successful than the first two, Mr. Geddes both suggests things that are simply smart game development choices attributable to any number of studios and games and criticizes what he sees as faults with Gears of War that are every bit as applicable to Halo.
One of the most critical issues with both Gears of War and its sequel is the rather lackluster multiplayer experience that is at best a tepid, toned down version of classic PC multiplayer deathmatches with the exception of the second game’s compelling Horde mode (in which up to five players must work together to face increasingly difficult waves of Locust forces with the goal of surviving as long as possible).
One compelling multiplayer mode is not good enough, though. Multiplayer is a very important aspect of games, especially shooters, these days, and gamers need more than just standard deathmatches if a game is to have any longevity. However, improving the flaws in the multiplayer experience is not emulating Halo 3 - there are plenty of action games with great multiplayer components such as the Call of Duty and Left4Dead series – but just following common sense.
In fact, I hope that Epic doesn’t try to make Gears of War’s multiplayer mode a mirror image of Halo 3′s (and, yes, I recognize that Mr. Geddes also stated they shouldn’t) because with Halo 3, the Halo franchise’s multiplayer experience has degenerated into a bunch of ten-year-old kids running out of the gate for the most powerful weapon and then jumping up and down all over the map while spewing vulgarities that would make Eminem cringe. And, yes, I’m hyperbolizing.
It really just seems as if Epic Games has lost some of its identity with its transition to the console world. They really redefined the PC multiplayer gaming experience with their Unreal Tournament series of competitive multiplayer games whose single player campaigns were just the multiplayer mode with bots yet chose to focus on the single-player experience with Gears of War.
They, along with other PC-centric developers like Valve Corporation, also made extraordinary efforts to work with the fan communities for their games with design director Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski often interacting with gamers on the company’s online forums and the company including hardcore fans in public beta tests of upcoming games and modes. Mr. Geddes seems to have forgotten this (or maybe never knew it in the first place) in speaking about Bungie’s multiplayer beta of Halo 3 as if they were the only company that did this.
On the other hand, I don’t think “community building” is really all that central to the success of mainstream blockbuster games these days. The hardcore fans might spend their time posting comments in Bungie, Epic and Valve’s forums, but the more mainstream gamers don’t visit gaming websites or post on message boards.
I assure you those mainstream gamers didn’t contribute to Halo 3′s eight million+ in sales because of what Bungie was doing at some gaming convention or because of cryptic websites, both of which really only matter to the devoted hardcore Halo loyalists. Everyone else? They were just brainwashed by the insane marketing machine Microsoft pushed out there, with images of the Master Chief everywhere from movie screens to bus stops to soda cans.
If Epic can really take anything away from this, it’s that you need to spend over $40 million if you want to sell eight million units of your game. I imagine, though, that they were happy with selling five million based on the strength of the previous game alone.
Mr. Geddes goes on to talk about how deep and expansive the Halo universe, how much more complex and provoking Bungie’s games are, when in reality the Halo and Gears of War worlds really aren’t that different when compared at face value. He states that Bungie is obsessed with expanding the universe “because they love it,” a sentiment that is contradicted by the rather lazy job they did with Halo 3. The rehashed story, recycled set pieces and stagnant gameplay tells the story of a development house that was sick of doing the same thing for a decade and rushed the game out so they could finally announce their split from Microsoft a week or two later. Hardly the behavior of a loving parent, is it?
Especially hilarious, though, are the criticisms Mr. Geddes levels towards Gears of War’s world without realizing that they apply as much, or even more so, to the Halo games. For example, he states that Halo is “about people struggling to survive against overwhelming odds” when a rather prosperous human race living on safe and sound Earth have a genetically engineered super soldier in tank armor who can skydive from one starship to another in orbit around a freakin’ planet to lay waste to the Covenant for them. That’s not to mention the entire army of soldiers with a fleet of spaceships and a seemingly endless amount of combat vehicles backing him up. But I guess the fear that the isolated pockets of emaciated stragglers exhibit anytime a pothole opens up in the ground or the lights go out at night on the planet that they had to bomb with nuclear warheads just to have a chance is all just an act.
He asks why Sera, that devastated planet on which Gears of War takes place, is worth saving. Why is Earth worth saving? It seems pretty obvious that Sera is the equivalent of Earth in the Gears universe considering the game notes at several points that the events unfolding before them are humanity’s last stand. Do we really need to know which specific people built the “towering buildings of lattice and spire,” which I might add look a helluva lot better than anything in Halo 3? Much like the barren wastelands of Fallout 3, the “destroyed beauty” of what remains of those magnificent structures tells a much more powerful story than some recited history lesson soliloquy from a floating metal sphere or blue holographic supermodel.
And while he’s right that we don’t know much about the Locust even after two games, how much did we really know about the Convenant and the Flood at the end of Halo 2? We don’t know where the Covenant or Flood came from whereas we know that the Locust call the subterranean bowels of Sera their home. We don’t really learn much more about the Covenant society than we do about the Locust society: both are actually collections of various species with the same “religious beliefs” – the Covenant believe in the “oracles” (the artificial intelligence maintaining the halo installations) and the Locust worship the riftworms.
We have no idea why the Covenant hate humanity so much whereas we learn through the course of the two Gears games that humanity’s ever-growing need for energy sources led them to dig into the Locusts’ territory, an intrusion the Locust chose to take as an act of war. The ensuing conflict even served a dual purpose for the Locust, who were in the midst of a civil war with Locusts who had been powerfully mutated by overexposure to the same energy source humans tried to harvest.
And the Flood? They don’t even have any real motivation we can gather aside from the – say it with me – cliché desire to assimilate all living creatures in the galaxy. They’re really nothing more than a virus – how many times have we witnessed that metaphor in science fiction works?
Ultimately, though, the real difference between the Gears of War and Halo franchises is the humanity of the former. Despite everything Mr. Geddes claims, Gears is a far more personal, far more emotional experience from the heart-racing, visceral, in-your-face nature of the combat with its focus on teamwork and strategy to the more believable and accessible purpose all the way to the actual characters themselves.
He describes Marcus and Dom as meat puppets which I suppose would make Master Chief a meat puppet in a can since he has virtually no personality and is one of the most underdeveloped characters in gaming history. Master Chief displays nary an emotion through the course of three games – the fate of the galaxy rests in his hands and friends and comrades fall left and right, yet you’d never know it with his calm demeanor and monotone murmurs. He fears no one and nothing, is never relieved at having just made it through a treacherous fight, has no sense of humor, and is never elated or even just happy for his victories.
Marcus Fenix, on the other hand, actually has a personality (even if it’s tough to make out through his gravelly voice). He’s sarcastic; he gets pumped up; he mourns the dead; he fears for his friend Dominic’s stability. Dominic himself is probably the most “real” character in either franchise: he pines for his missing wife, is quick with a witty comment or wry jab at a comrade and understands far more than most people about the cruelty of the world and the necessity for military strength.
And let’s not forget about one of the most colorful characters in video games in a while: Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, who makes even the most grueling combat situations enjoyable with his enthusiastic banter and overconfident trash talk towards the enemy. He loves the thrill and the adrenaline, which is probably the reason why he was a star defensive lineman for the national “thrashball” league before all hell broke loose on Sera, a celebrity status that is reflected in non-player character reaction to and interaction with him (even your squad mates gush when first meeting him in the first game).
All these little details and nuances help make Gears of War feel so much more alive than the rather disconnected and neutered experience of Halo 3. This isn’t to say, however, that Gears of War did everything perfectly. The reason anyone can even claim that the franchise needs some degree of “saving” is because the single-player campaign mode of the second game simply fell flat, ironically because they listened too much to the fans.
To appease gamers who didn’t like the single-minded focus on generally close quarters squad-based tactical ground combat, the team diluted Gears of War 2 with new scenarios that felt tacked on – freeform vehicular sections where the player pilots an armored vehicle with clunky controls through icy caverns and fights giant spiders, tedious battles on top of giant armored transports, a Panzer Dragoon-inspired aerial on-rails level, and an excruciatingly boring and contrived end game where the player rides on the back of a plodding Brumak (a several-stories-tall monstrosity covered in armor and armed with missile launchers and guns).
I agree with Mr. Geddes when he says that Epic needs to bring the Gears of War franchise “back to basics.” It was a mistake to try to “go big” and expand the scale to be a little more like Halo 3. Gears shouldn’t be about Michael Bay-esque set pieces but about dark and gritty combat where the already wasted landscape is left a lot bloodier. It should be about saving the species and the planet, a more realistic, attainable goal that people can better wrap their heads around, rather than trying to stop some intergalactic force from destroying the galaxy with just an assault rifle and a couple of energy grenades – Gears works best as Saving Private Ryan, not the latest James Bond flick, and is a better game for it.
In fact, the Halo series could do well to emulate some aspects of Gears, and actually has already started to do so. Even after the disappointment of Halo 3, I was excited about Halo 3: ODST and later Halo: Reach. The scale of both games is cut back quite a bit.
In ODST, you’re just another soldier in the military rather than John McClane on steroids. You can’t go all gung ho on the Convenant and expect to last long – some degree of rudimentary stealth is inherent in the game.
In Reach, you even know right off the bat, if you paid any attention at all during the three proper Halo games, that you’re not going to save anything: Reach falls no matter what you do. There’s a more prevalent sense of danger in that even though you’re still playing a Spartan like Master Chief, the forces must be threatening indeed as they were able to wipe out an entire platoon of Master Chiefs. No more laughing in the face of danger, hopefully.
However, the thing that needs to change the most is the technology. Halo 3′s game engine, which is a moderately enhanced version of the Halo 2 game engine, itself a moderately enhanced version of the Halo game engine created way back at the turn of the millennium, is showing its age with subpar modeling lacking in intricate detail. Put side-by-side with Gears of War or Sony’s Uncharted, Halo 3 looks like a decidedly last generation effort.
I had hoped when Bungie announced their split from Microsoft that this would open up the possibility of another developer such as Epic to step in and create a truly innovative new game engine that could help usher the franchise into the top echelon of current-generation video games.
It remains to be seen whether Microsoft and Bungie will do the right thing and take a page out of everyone else’s playbook this time.
Experience this for yourself!
- Halo 3 (Xbox 360)
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- Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360)
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- Gears of War Platinum Hits Edition (Xbox 360)
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- Gears of War 2 Game of the Year Edition (Xbox 360)
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